volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@gooba42 It's probably worse than that.

I'm not bothering to look it up (correct me if you know better) but I imagine it's a municipal water supply. I've seen this in other places. It's not just about taxing the use of water for purposes other than drinking, but the city itself choosing to charge so little even for industrial purposes.

I even have in mind a case where the governmental board that sets the water price had a bunch of industrial Representatives on the board voting themselves low prices.

I consider it one of those examples of governmental action that impacts people pretty directly, but that people are generally unaware of because they're distracted by national politics that don't actually make that much difference in the end.

@aureliano he needs to score points with them because he's an idiot who lives on attention. He needs their attention. It's what fuels him.

And in return that's how conservatives are using him to troll the rest of the country.

You're probably saying he doesn't need to score points with his base in terms of winning the election, but this is critical, it's not about winning the election to them. It's about fighting, not winning.

If Republicans wanted to win they would have nominated someone with more of a chance to win. No, nominating Trump is not about winning, that's not their priority. They want to fight, to throw their punk tantrum against The Man that they think has failed them.

And that's why Trump needs to score points with them: to get the attention that they're using to get him to be ugly to the rest of us.

@bronakins

@SmudgeTheInsultCat from what I hear from conservative media, Republicans have been feeling like fiscal responsibility has taken a backseat on their priority list behind a lot of other issues they have with the directions the institutions have gone for a while now.

They feel like they'll talk about fiscal responsibility after they first sort out things like their perception of corruption in the government.

Also: Harris doesn't make a good case for fiscal responsibility anyway, neither in her track record nor in her campaign promises.

So it's a loser coming and going. Republicans don't really care about fiscal responsibility at the moment, and even if they did Harris wouldn't be the candidate for that.

@gooba42 they can. If they don't it's because society didn't incentivize them to do it.

If you under price drinking water then it's going to be used instead of more expensive purified water.

@Catelli Well it's not so much willful ignorance as willful confirmation bias.

Give people access to a ton of information without the discipline to approach it logically and this is the outcome.

@moira and Harris has openly said she was going to ignore the democratic process and claim authorities that she doesn't have to implement policies without legal backing.

The problem is that, while Trump is impotent with a track record of failure, Harris might actually be able to act on those promises.

Unfortunately the two parties both settled on authoritarian candidates. We don't have a choice for reasonableness in this election cycle.

But I'm happy to try to keep power away from the authoritarian that might actually be able to succeed even if it means going to the authoritarian that's going to screw it up.

@knittingknots2 outsmart the Court? No. He obeyed the Court.

The Court pointed out that this administration was overstepping its legal authority with the prosecutions it was bringing, and Smith dialed it back to stay on the right side of the law.

That's how it's supposed to work.

@Laukidh exactly, on paper there was a ceasefire, and yet people didn't cease firing, which goes to show exactly what I'm talking about, how impossible it is.

It's just not a realistic option. It was tried over and over again and here we are, it doesn't work, it's not a viable option.

@Laukidh No not at all!

I'm not blaming the dead Hamas negotiator for anything. He just wasn't relevant anyway. He doesn't have blame because he couldn't have stopped it no matter what. He did not have the ability to stop those outside of his chain of command.

He doesn't have blame because he never had the ability to stop it in the first place.

If you want to say Israel killed this guy for no reason, well I wouldn't go that far, but there is some element of truth to it.

@Laukidh he could.

And the rockets would continue to be fired.

Both sides are aggressors here. The problem is, one side doesn't actually have the ability to stop aggressing. It's literally not possible because of the organization, or lack thereof, of the belligerants.

@munin because people with skin in the game decided that these people offered something worth paying them for.

That's why.

@Laukidh Yeah that's my point.

With out a reliable command structure it doesn't really matter what Hamas agrees to since that never has been a way to stop the rockets.

It doesn't matter what some public official agrees to if they're not actually in charge of the situation, which we saw over and over again, is the case here.

Yeah Hamas can agree to a lot of things. That's never meant that the agreements would be worth the paper the headlines are printed on. It's just posturing at that point.

@NZedAUS I think that you are focusing on Trump and missing the larger situation: it's not about what Trump has left or what he says, it's about his supporters projecting onto him.

What he has isn't fear and racism; it never was. What he has is a significant swath of US voters who feel disconnected from the federal government and see in him a vessel to express their discontent. Plenty see him as a way to set fire to the institutions that they feel have let them down.

All Trump has left is fear and racism? No. What he has is a crowd that uses him to vent their discontent.

@Laukidh No, it can't be ended. There is literally no one who can end it. The aggressor s are too dispersed without formalized command and control structures, so the aggression will continue, the war will continue.

That's just reality on the ground.

There can be no ceasefire because there's no one to agree to a ceasefire. The rockets will continue to fire, the war will continue.

That's just the unfortunate reality. It does us no good to turn a blind eye to it.

@Linux_in_a_Bit remember that the plane full of people died because the pilots violated procedures. The human factor was key to that tragedy.

And there are parallels with this.

@GaryRLundberg Right but with stories like these I always think we need to go deeper, looking at the structural issues that make them stories in the first place.

Often enough when there's a story about potential presidential exercise of authority the problem is that he has the authority in the first place, and we should probably reconsider granting that authority to the president, no matter who the president is.

@Roddee so much of that from the Afghanistan claim through the NATO claims have been roundly debunked for years.

But more importantly, even if all of that nonsense was true, the Biden administration has been empowered to overcome it all. He's had years to implement his policies that would have easily fixed that supposed sabotage.

So the story is not true in the first place, and even if it was true it doesn't make sense to say the president was so hamstrung. It's a false story that doesn't make sense anyway.